Trying The Oldest Text Editor In Linux - The ed Command

This ancient text editor is surprisingly hard to use. How do you even view the file you're editing? How do you add text? In this video I review all this and more.

The 'ed' editor has its roots in the late 1960s during the early development of Linux. The original version was written by Ken Thompson on a PDP-7.

*** This is a re-upload of the (now deleted) previous version of this video id = 8vmOTvRXZ0E

The previous version that I uploaded had issues with volume normalization that I have now fixed.

A text-based version of this video can be found here:

SOCIALS
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[AeriaVelocity]

“I want an EDitor! Not a ‘viitor’! Not an ‘emacsitor’! Those aren’t even WORDS!”

[techingtech]

Because of this video and your shorts I have become a Patreon member! Somehow you manage to be fun, educational, and engaging.
God love you!

[gertrudestrawberry]

Your demo model was so creative and effective! I'll never forget it!

[rafajanicki]

Honestly, it is still beyond me why do you have only ~550 subscriptions. Your videos are great, in-depth and entertaining :)
Keep up the great work, Robert! Looking forward for your next video :) Stay safe, mate!

[xdead]

Finally a good quality content about UNIX tools, subbed.

[lorensims]

Wonderful explanation, and the first video I've seen where the name 'ed' is pronounced correctly!
Like ex and vi, you just say the letters.
Last year I decided to keep things simple and now ed is my primary command-line editor.
I like the way it doesn't take over my terminal display the way vim and Emacs (and for that matter nano) do.
it's simple and powerful, launches quickly, and exits cleanly.
Some people say it's fine for small files but they wouldn't want to have to use it for longer texts.
I remind them that actually most of Unix was written with it.

[tomy]

Didn't planned to spend more than 10 seconds but ended up staying up to whole video. Your explanations are engaging.

[hjlp]

Back in the days when an operating system was needed for the first Personal Computer, MicroSoft made a cheap'n'nasty hack of producing a single-user, single-task version of Unix and called it Disk Operating System (DOS). For copyright reasons they had to change all kinds of command names. Ed became "edlin" in DOS, and I used to love using it, because it was fast and incredibly cool and geeky when others were watching. 😎👍

[pineberryfox]

the manpage for ed is significantly more informative on a BSD system than on a GNU system. the commands and addressing modes are actually detailed! the GNU project just hates manpages

[MarkMatthewMurray]

Great video. Always wondered how terminals worked.

[coffeedude]

Great video! It's hard to find such engaging content on niche things like these

[halfsourlizard]

Ed's actually extremely useful when you've derped up your terminal or are unable to use control keys (When `esc` isn't usable, neither are Vi/Vim.). Line editors also require a rather fun way of thinking, and Ed, in particular, makes `sed` and `grep` make much more sense.

[Mutombo]

I used this in university a few years 😁 ago. Imagine writing a Fortran program with this.

[konradergon]

Excellent video! And you even pronounced it right!

[Teknishun]

Very instructive and interesting stuff.

[jongeduard]

Learning more everyday. Thank you! Now I also understand better how everything works perfectly over an SSH terminal session for example (bash, vim, nano, all of it, completely with colors and correct coordinates, even when I resize the terminal emulator window). It's all just the exchange of that ANSI escape sequences that does the whole magic.
Can we also call it a protocol?
It also reminds me me a bit of today's HTTP protocol and HTML language in the sense of remote communication in combination with the concept of a markup language. It's the client (the browser) that renders everything grapically, but HTTP communication itself goes in both directions, especially with the web APIs of today.

[sirrobertdowneysenior]

Frnd pulled a prank on me ed on autostart after boot 😑 now had to find out how to exit. Digging out "?" Is ed output was the first step.
Ty q enter worked. 🙈

[matthun]

There are some teachers who have their students write code on paper. Now I wonder if that exists because the teachers of their teachers' teachers actually coded in the 60s/70s, where you would want to write your code out on paper first, because it would have been a pain to try to find and fix your mistakes using ed.

[alexanderushakov]

Thank you for the video, it's helpful and interesting.

[xA]

MS-DOS had a similar command/utility called edlin.